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A Notting Hill Mummy just trying to be a great mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend and writer, chronicling the absurd but wonderful, ridiculous but sometimes inspiring, lives of Notting Hill residents

A few nights ago, I was having dinner with a very good friend, an ex-Londoner, turned New Yorker who was visiting London. She had invited her closest ‘London’ friends, some of whom she hadn’t seen in four or five years, to a ‘girls’ dinner for a proper ‘cocktails and sushi’ catch up. We went to Roka Mayfair, a new stalwart for its absolutely delicious food (yellowtail sashimi in truffle oil comes to mind), and the 8-person round table, ideal for big group conversations.

Just to preface it, these girls were the champagne-swirling, table-dancing, crackbaby-downing (Boujis fans, anyone?) kind-of-girls. And here we were, 10 years later, chatting about our in-laws (‘can you believe she stayed for 6 weeks?!’), competing for ‘who-has-the-most-useless-husband,’ what-cute-things-our-daugther/son-do-cue-here’s-a-photo and who-was-having-the-least-amount-of-sex when it dawned on us that we had reached Middle-Age. My dear friend, who is turning 45 this year, lamented: ‘I’m turning 45! That’s half of 90! I have lived half my life! I am officially Middle-Aged!’

Instead of getting depressed at this prospect and telling her ‘age is just a number’, we came up with 20 ways of knowing whether you are middle-aged:

You know you’re Middle-Aged When….

1)…You think the ‘Cloud’ is something that’s in the sky formed from condensed water which will produce rain. Equally, ‘cookies’ are something you bake for your children’s afternoon snack.

2)…You have never heard of ‘Zoella’ and don’t know what ‘vloggers’ actually do

3)…You don’t understand the point of Snapchat

4)…You really start to wonder what it would be like to date on Tinder

5)…You think midnight is a really late night out. And for those nights, you need to prepare with an afternoon nap.

6)…You’re the first to arrive and the first to leave a restaurant. And you’re no longer embarrassed. Ditto Parties.

7)…You start complaining at dinner that ‘this restaurant is too loud’

8)…You get really excited when someone mentions going clubbing after dinner, only to realise that your bed is a much, much more alluring proposition

9)…You go to the Chiltern Firehouse Private Bar and realise that the oldest person there (apart from you) is 10 years younger than you

10)…You look at twentysomethings at the Westbourne/Anglesea Arms/Walmer Castle/[insert trendy, young, pub or bar] nostalgically (enviously) and think to yourself ‘that used to be me’

11)…You are seriously excited to stay home on a Saturday night to watch the new season of Games of Thrones on netflix

12)…You tell your teenage nephew that your all-time favourite band is U2 and he looks at you blankly